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Non-Marketers’ Funnel for Finding Clarity in Your Life and Business

Marketers know it.

They often use funnel visualisations to see how they are achieving their goals.

Generally, having highly effective funnels makes your campaigns achieve more, saving you from potential confusions. This way, vast amount of data points can be organised into structured layers of human interactions and engagement. And by having the effective processes, greater results can be created more consistently.

While funnel visualisations have been mostly used in audience conversion practices in business, it might also be useful to think about using it in another way — in attaining many of your life’s goals.

If you find that there are too many distractions, possible action points and choices in your life and you are not clear on what’s leading to what, then organising your thinking first just like great marketers do would potentially help you become more effective, certain and focused too.

Here’s one example of such a funnel. Let’s call this the ‘Success Funnel’.

Step 1: Awareness

Let’s say, you want to attain greater financial wealth or health. Having that awareness is the initial key to reaching there. Many people who are struggling day by day might not even notice that they are having an issue or that they can actually change their status. For anything you want to achieve, you have to start with a goal in mind. And that goal needs to be aligned with what you truly desire too.

Step 2: Knowledge & Insights

After becoming aware of the need for change, you can choose to collect information and insights that help you achieve that goal. In order to create great results, you need to know the right approach.

Step 3: Trial & Action

But having knowledge alone does not transform you or your experience. You have to take action to implement that key learning. Unless you try, you never know whether it works or not.

Step 4: Review & Personalisation

Just taking many actions randomly and mindlessly is not the key to real success either. You have to pause and review the initial outcome. You also cannot just do what others are doing and expect that to work for you. You need to understand yourself, the outcome you experience, and personalise the method. You need to feel good about what you are doing and create the result you truly resonate with.

Step 5: Repetition & Habit

Once you figure out what action to take, you can then repeat it until it becomes your habit, or a part of your identity. This is one of the most difficult steps in our journey for change. Changing the existing habits or creating new ones takes continuous effort. And we are not naturally good at it. But when you can change your habit, you can change the outcome effectively in the long-run.

Step 6: Results & Appreciation

When you experience more of the great results you aimed to create, the final step is to appreciate what you have achieved. To be grateful for the people who helped you, for the opportunities you received and the gift you attained. And now, it’s time for you to support others, share what you have and contribute.

Improving each layer of this funnel improves the quality of your life and the results you experience that are in line with your goals. You can have multiple funnels that you continuously build and improve on. Life is a journey of continuous improvements.

But what about those who get lucky and achieve great success without really taking any of these six steps (like becoming very rich overnight by winning a lottery)?

We know that these temporary situations are unlikely to last for a long time. When we do not grow our own capacity to produce great results, temporary situations may boost our results for a short time but not for long. But those who build great capacity to produce results can thrive regardless of external situations.

Building our capacity to create great impact through conscious learning and effort is an important element of our long-term success — to become who we really want to become. And through the effort we make, we develop our capacity to be grateful for the things we attain too.

Having good results without a sense of appreciation is meaningless. Creating great results as a result of great effort is rewarding. And sharing that great win with those who we care about is priceless.

And that sense of appreciation can often be the one factor lacking at the end of our funnels.

Now with our conscious effort, the funnels we design can help us harvest the true rewards of our life.